Social Roulette Is the Best (and Scariest) Way to Delete Your Facebook Account

If you have suicidal Facebook tendencies — as in, you want off the social network but just can't bare to part with your photos, wall posts, and all those precious, precious likes — then you should probably try playing the new game Social Roulette.

You've heard of Russin Roulette before, yes? Everyone's seen some crazy person play it in a movie — or that movie. You put a single bullet in a gun, spin the chamber, put the gun to your head, and hope for the best. Sometimes you win, sometimes your brains paint the wall. It's easy. It's horrifying. Now imagine that, but with Facebook.

Social Roulette is the new game designed by Jonas Lund, Jonas Jongelan, and NYU ITP adjunct professor Kyle McDonald. It gives you a one-in-six chance of having all of your friends, photos, and likes deleted before it will deactivate your account. Sure, you can reactivate your account, but none of your stuff will be there. It's like gambling with something you have no problem doing away with, which is sort of what gambling's all about, except you don't really win anything but freedom... and then dread.

It took us a full 20 minutes, after we saw it getting passed around a bunch today, to muster the courage to even try the game. So far as we know, this is the only social game in the ever-popular world of social games that has ever confronted social people with the end of their social social lives. If you're been using Facebook long enough, losing everything could be traumatizing in a way. Even the existential dread of saying goodbye to those old college photos you'd rather forget — that could take a while to get over. But then the game didn't work. It's returning an error message right now. But we promise, we were going to play. We were going to risk it all.